Social journal app maker Flipboard is reinventing itself for the brand new period of the open social internet. While the corporate’s unique app allowed customers to gather content material from blogs, information web sites, and conventional social media providers like Facebook and Twitter so as to create curated magazines, its new app referred to as Surf, launching into invite-only beta immediately, will as an alternative permit customers to browse and discover the open social internet. This consists of providers like Mastodon and Bluesky, in addition to different public internet content material like blogs, podcasts, YouTube movies, and extra.
To work, Surf helps open protocols like RSS, which offers feeds for updates from web sites and podcasts, Bluesky’s newer AT Protocol, and ActivityPub, which powers decentralized X competitor Mastodon, plus Pixelfed, PeerTube, Friendica, Ghost, and others, and is built-in with Meta’s personal X competitor, Instagram Threads.
According to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Surf has been in improvement for nearly two years to resolve most of the issues customers face after they wish to depart bigger, centralized social media providers in favor of these constructed with open protocols.
“Under the hood, it’s a browser for the social internet,” says McCue. “[Surf] allows you to browse any feed on the social internet, whether or not it’s ActivityPub, AT Proto, or RSS,” he continues. “People, in fact, have their profiles — these are feeds you could surf. There are hashtags which can be feeds. Searches generally is a feed.”
On the app’s house web page, Flipboard’s editorial staff gives quite a lot of pre-made feeds to observe, organized into sections like Featured, Trending, Expert Voices, Communities, and others.
But what makes the app highly effective is you could additionally construct your personal customized feeds that mix sources of your personal selecting.
For occasion, when you needed to observe a particular subject, like AI mannequin improvement, or a interest like mountain biking, you would mix feeds that embrace the folks you’d wish to observe, real-time searches, key phrases, widespread hashtags, particular RSS feeds for web sites and blogs you want, favourite YouTube channels, podcasts and extra.
Plus, Surf offers you plenty of options to raised configure and management the customized feeds you design.
The app comes with some 30,000 pre-defined matters you possibly can mix and configure. Even when you add folks or web sites that put up a few vary of various topics, you possibly can go into your customized feed’s settings and toggle on an choice to “Keep Feed on Topic.”
This routinely filters out any information or posts that aren’t about your topic of curiosity from showing within the feed.
You — and optionally, different contributors — may additional configure the feeds to incorporate or exclude replies, reposts, or mature content material, and alter how the feed can be ordered.
Custom feeds may help a number of matters, if desired. (Initially, this can be through the use of “AND” to create a customized feed that mixes two matters. But later, you’ll be capable to curate feeds by saying this “OR” that, Flipboard says).
As you browse a feed, there are a number of methods to view it, too.
A “Discuss” tab gives a Twitter-like timeline expertise the place posts from throughout social networks and websites are featured, which you too can like, reply to, repost, and bookmark, when logged in together with your Mastodon credentials. (Support for Bluesky login will arrive in a couple of weeks).
However, you too can browse the feed by different tabs, “Watch,” “Read,” “Listen,” and “Look,” when you filter the feed to indicate solely movies, information articles, podcasts, and images, respectively.
In the “Watch” mode video view, looking the feed feels rather a lot like scrolling TikTook.
Feed homeowners can select which of those is the feed’s default tab.
The app will be notably helpful for these occasions when a neighborhood has grow to be fractured throughout a number of providers, as was the case with these posting to the hashtag NBA Threads on Metas’ Threads app. Some folks left Threads for Bluesky and Mastodon after Meta’s moderation points, which meant customers now needed to flip to a number of apps to observe the neighborhood.
With Surf, the neighborhood has been reunited by the use of a customized feed that pulls in content material from totally different providers.
As Surf was being constructed, Flipboard was additionally integrating its journal app with the open social internet, often known as the fediverse, by connecting it with extra open providers like Mastodon and Bluesky,
“These current experiences which were made open — that’s been like the primary wave of the social internet,” McCue explains, referring to the updates his firm made to Flipboard. “Now, I feel we’re getting into the subsequent wave…which is imagining fully new sorts of consumer experiences that we’ve by no means seen earlier than, based mostly on the facility of the social internet.”
Surf is at present in an invite-only, closed beta, the place the primary testers can be those that are seemingly serious about constructing feeds as a result of they’ve already constructed issues like customized feeds or Starter Packs on Bluesky, or Twitter/X Lists, for instance.
The app is initially accessible on iOS and Android on an invite-only foundation whereas in beta testing, however will later be accessible on the desktop internet.
